Analogical reasoning with novel concepts: Differential attention of intellectually gifted and nongifted children to relevant and irrelevant novel stimuli

Intellectually gifted and nongifted students in grades 6, 7, and 8 were given a modified verbal analogies test in which typical verbal analogy problems were preceded by novel or familiar statements about one of the analogy terms. The test required subjects to integrate this new information into an otherwise familiar problem-solving task. Both gifted and nongifted students gave significantly more attention to novel information than to familiar information. Gifted students gave significantly less attention to irrelevant novel information than did nongifted students, but did not differ from nongifted students in their attention to relevant novel information. Whereas intellectually gifted students gave significantly more time to relevant than to irrelevant novel information, non-gifted students allocated as much time to irrelevant novel information as they did to relevant novel information. Performance on this task was significantly correlated with teachers' ratings of intellectual ability for gifted, but not for nongifted students.     

Stress affects the selection of relevant from irrelevant stimuli

Two experiments were used to examine the effects of stress on latent inhibition (LI; poorer learning with a previously exposed irrelevant stimulus rather than a novel stimulus). In Experiment 1, stress was induced in college students by threatening participants' self-esteem with a difficult number series completion test that was related to intelligence. In Experiment 2, the participants were job seekers who were either informed or not that the LI test was part of the selection process. In both experiments, LI was attenuated in high- as compared with low-stressed participants. The results suggest that stress and/or anxiety impairs the inhibition of irrelevant-preexposed stimuli. Implications for understanding the impaired selective attentional processes in schizophrenia and schizotypy are discussed.     

Auditory sequence learning: differential sensitivity to task relevant and task irrelevant sequences

Using a serial reaction time task, this study examines whether learning of auditory sequences is possible without a corresponding motor response, i.e., by listening alone. The dual sequence paradigm used by Mayr (in Journal of the Experimental Psychology: Learning memory and cognition 22:350–354, 1996, Experiment 1) was adapted to the auditory domain. Four different actors spoke the same four colour words. These were presented such that speaker identity followed one sequence, and the word spoken followed a different sequence. Subjects were asked to respond (with a key press) to one of these dimensions (identity or word), and ignore the other. Results showed learning for either type of stimulus, but only when it was responded to. No learning of either type of auditory sequence by listening alone was found. The results add evidence to visual implicit learning studies that have failed to find learning of event sequences when spatial or response selection was not an important factor in processing. The findings are discussed in the context of implicit learning as a general and fundamental cognitive process.     

Conditions of directed attention inhibit recognition performance for explicitly presented target-aligned irrelevant stimuli

The fate of irrelevant and overtly presented stimuli that was temporally aligned with an attended target in a separate task was explored. Seitz and Watanabe (2003) demonstrated that if an irrelevant motion stimulus was implicit (i.e., subthreshold), a later facilitation for the same motion direction was observed if the previously presented implicit motion (of the same direction) was temporally aligned with the presence of an attended target. Later research, however, demonstrated that if the motion stimulus aligned with the attended target was explicit (i.e., suprathreshold), a later inhibition was observed (Tsushima, Seitz, & Watanabe, 2008). The current study expands on this by using more salient stimuli (words and pictures) in an inattentional blindness paradigm, and suggests that when attention is depleted, recognition for target-aligned task-irrelevant items is impaired in a subsequent recognition task. Participants were required to respond to either immediate picture, or word, repetitions in a stream of simultaneously presented line drawings and written words, and later given a surprise recognition test that measured recognition for the words or the pictures. When analyzing word recognition performance after attention had been directed to the pictures, words that had appeared simultaneously with a picture repetition in the repetition detection task were recognized at levels significantly below chance. The same inhibition was mirrored when testing for picture recognition after having attended to the words in the repetition detection task. These data suggest an inhibitory mechanism that is exhibited in later recognition tests for salient information that was previously unattended and had been simultaneously being presented with an attended target in a different task.     

Masked stimuli modulate endogenous shifts of spatial attention

Unconscious stimuli can influence participants’ motor behavior but also more complex mental processes. Recent research has gradually extended the limits of effects of unconscious stimuli. One field of research where such limits have been proposed is spatial cueing, where exogenous automatic shifts of attention have been distinguished from endogenous controlled processes which govern voluntary shifts of attention. Previous evidence suggests unconscious effects on mechanisms of exogenous shifts of attention. Here, we applied a cue-priming paradigm to a spatial cueing task with arbitrary cues by centrally presenting a masked symmetrical prime before every cue stimulus. We found priming effects on response times in target discrimination tasks with the typical dynamic of cue-priming effects (Experiments 1 and 2) indicating that central symmetrical stimuli which have been associated with endogenous orienting can modulate shifts of spatial attention even when they are masked. Prime–Cue Congruency effects of perceptual dissimilar prime and cue stimuli (Experiment 3) suggest that these effects cannot be entirely reduced to perceptual repetition priming of cue processing. In addition, priming effects did not differ between participants with good and poor prime recognition performance consistent with the view that unconscious stimulus features have access to processes of endogenous shifts of attention.     

The effect of spatial attention on invisible stimuli

The influence of selective attention on visual processing is widespread. Recent studies have demonstrated that spatial attention can affect processing of invisible stimuli. However, it has been suggested that this effect is limited to low-level features, such as line orientations. The present experiments investigated whether spatial attention can influence both low-level (contrast threshold) and high-level (gender discrimination) adaptation, using the same method of attentional modulation for both types of stimuli. We found that spatial attention was able to increase the amount of adaptation to low- as well as to high-level invisible stimuli. These results suggest that attention can influence perceptual processes independent of visual awareness.     

Differential impact of relevant and irrelevant dimension primes on rule-based and information-integration category learning

Research has identified multiple category-learning systems with each being “tuned” for learning categories with different task demands and each governed by different neurobiological systems. Rule-based (RB) classification involves testing verbalizable rules for category membership while information-integration (II) classification requires the implicit learning of stimulus–response mappings. In the first study to directly test rule priming with RB and II category learning, we investigated the influence of the availability of information presented at the beginning of the task. Participants viewed lines that varied in length, orientation, and position on the screen, and were primed to focus on stimulus dimensions that were relevant or irrelevant to the correct classification rule. In Experiment 1, we used an RB category structure, and in Experiment 2, we used an II category structure. Accuracy and model-based analyses suggested that a focus on relevant dimensions improves RB task performance later in learning while a focus on an irrelevant dimension improves II task performance early in learning.     

From top to bottom: spatial shifts of attention caused by linguistic stimuli

Interacting with the world around us involves dealing with constant information input. Thus, humans must selectively filter and focus attention on relevant aspects for the current situation. The current study investigates orientations of attention after words that do not convey spatial information in their meaning (e.g. cloud, shoe). The current study minimizes both the linguistic demands by simply presenting task-irrelevant words and the visual processing demands by implementing a simple target detection task. According to automatic response biases in the motor domain (Lachmair et al. 2011), we hypothesized that words such as cloud produce attention shifts in the direction of the typical location of the word's referent in the world (e.g. cloud up in the sky). Indeed, target detection was facilitated if target location matched the typical location of the word's referent. These findings are strong evidence for the important role of space during language processing, showing that vertical attention is modulated even by task-irrelevant verbal cues.     

The influence of relevant and irrelevant stereoscopic depth cues: Depth information does not always capture attention

Previous research reported ambiguous findings regarding the relationship of visuospatial attention and (stereoscopic) depth information. Some studies indicate that attention can be focused on a distinct depth plane, while other investigations revealed attentional capture from irrelevant items located in other, unattended depth planes. To evaluate whether task relevance of depth information modulates the deployment of attentional resources across depth planes, the additional singleton paradigm was adapted: Singletons defined by depth (i.e., displayed behind or in front of a central depth plane) or color (green against gray) were presented among neutral items and served as targets or (irrelevant) distractors. When participants were instructed to search for a color target, no attentional capture from irrelevant depth distractors was observed. In contrast, it took substantially longer to search for depth targets when an irrelevant distractor was presented simultaneously. Color distractors as well as depth distractors caused attentional capture, independent of the distractors’ relative depth position (i.e., in front of or behind the target). However, slight differences in task performance were obtained depending on whether or not participants fixated within the target depth plane. Thus, the current findings indicate that attentional resources in general are uniformly distributed across different depth planes. Although task relevant depth singletons clearly affect the attentional system, this information might be processed subsequent to other stimulus features.